MUSIC REVIEW

'Oedipus,' With Tears And Chimes

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Published: April 26, 1997

Harry Partch's vision of total musical theater surely did not include singer-actors reading from the book and decorous wafts of ritual. He wanted vividness. He wanted intoxication. His one-man dispute with Western culture was rooted in a dismissal of anything learned or abstract. He looked to the musical cultures of ancient China and Greece, in which sound, display, word and gesture were welded and magically potent. He spoke of the ''emotional saturation, or transcendence, that it is the particular province of dramatic music to achieve.'' He was a hobo Antonin Artaud.

But if Thursday night's performance of his ''Oedipus'' failed to live up to his ideals, the faults were at least as much in the piece as in the mildness and rehearsal quality of the theatrical presentation at the Metropolitan Museum. Quite simply, there isn't much music in this score. Partch insisted on one thing at a time (this was another quarrel he had with the Western musical tradition) and he largely avoided having his singer-actors accompanied by instrumental music of any great elaboration.

Much of his ''Oedipus'' consists of declamation, whether spoken or chanted, with chimes, stationary backgrounds and cadences. Only toward the end, when we come to Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus's self-blinding, does the array of specially built instruments begin to wake up. At this point on Thursday one could begin to feel the heartbeat Partch was looking for, as an embracing percussion ostinato was joined by a shrill, trilling clarinet in mounting exhilaration.

Partch was obliged to make his own instruments because he needed a new tuning system, more on course with natural vibration. But he turned necessity into opportunity and created things as beautiful as their names: cloud chamber bowls, made from Pyrex carboys, or marimba eroica, with huge wooden slabs and resonators. He wanted his shows to look good, with his instruments set around the stage, though unfortunately in the cramped space at the museum they all had to be bunched together.

Still, opportunities to experience the Partch instrumentarium are rare, and it was excellent to be hearing live the authentic sonorities of the composer's aged recordings: the reed-organ wheezes, the deep-bass thumps, the arpeggios from the zitherlike harmonic canon that sound like cast jewels. Dean Drummond, whose ensemble, Newband, has the care of the Partch instruments, was conducting a group of professional and student musicians.

Among the vocal performers, Joe Garcia commandingly brought before us an Oedipus speaking out of a snarl of contempt. Gregory Sims, a vital actor, made Creon's part passionately important, and Robert Osborne, as Tiresias, was able to convey the special qualities of Partchian incantation, which often seems to imitate the sick drone of someone on illicit substances.

Photo: Joe Garcia, center left, as Oedipus and Gregory Sims as Creon. (Jack Vartoogian for The New York Times)